Carmen Silla: All our innovations are designed to eliminate water and chemical use

PDS Group is a global supply chain solutions partner to some of the world’s leading brands and retailers. PDS is an entrepreneurial company with a strong sustainability focus – with their keen design sense, extensive industry experience and adoption of the latest techniques and technologies, PDS is enabling the fashion industry around the world to cater to the fast-evolving tastes and preferences of consumers. When Sanjay Jain, Group CEO, PDS Limited, talks about the future of fashion, it’s all about innovation with purpose. In this exclusive chat with Divya Shetty, he reveals how PDS is weaving sustainability into India’s growth story.

Can you tell us about the key initiatives PDS is undertaking for retailers and brands across the world?

We are a global supply chain solutions partner, offering end-to-end, customized, and scalable sourcing and manufacturing capabilities to retailers and apparel brands worldwide through a plug-and-play model that is asset light.

The retail sector has faced significant challenges in recent years due to consolidation and COVID-19. Retailers now have to prioritise activities that directly engage customers, while outsourcing back-end operations to credible partners like us. PDS manages end-to-end, multi-country sourcing across 600+ factories covering apparel, accessories, home, and more. Through our Design-Led Sourcing model, we also serve as the creative arm for retailers and brands — bringing fresh concepts, trends, and innovation to life.

For example, when retailers don’t want to run offices in certain geographies due to overheads and local nuances, we step in to manage those offices — that’s what we call ‘Sourcing as a Service.’ Retailers can give us visibility of their businesses, and on a fee basis, we manage factory operations transparently on their behalf.

Many brands today that are struggling on their own are being acquired by private equity firms. While franchisees manage the stores, someone needs to handle global brand management and design centres – that’s another area we handle.

We have our own manufacturing facilities in Bangladesh & Sri Lanka. As part of our Made in India initiative, we acquired a majority stake in Knit Gallery, a leading manufacturing company based in Tiruppur. We took this this step because India’s manufacturing capabilities are strengthening and growing rapidly, especially after the UK–India FTA, and we are very optimistic about the market opportunity it presents. UK is one of our largest markets, and with this acquisition, we aim to facilitate more exports from India. In fact, we recently worked closely with the Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) and the Textile Ministry during their UK visit to showcase to showcase potential of Indian originated companies.

So our offerings include:

• Design-led Sourcing
• Sourcing-as-a-Service
• Global Brand Management
• Manufacturing

The Indian government has launched schemes like PM MITRA to enhance textile infrastructure. How is PDS aligning with these initiatives?

PDS is an asset-light company — less than 10 per cent of our revenue comes from our own manufacturing. For example, in Bangladesh, we have two units with a turnover of around $100 million annually, but we facilitate exports worth over $1 billion.

In India, after acquiring Knit Gallery, we’re demonstrating our capability locally. That unit currently has about Rs 3 billion turnover, and at full capacity, it can reach Rs 6 billion. Based on our success in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, we expect to facilitate about Rs 60 billion in exports from India in the next 4 to 5 years.

We plan to partner with new manufacturing units, bring customer access, global best practices, compliance expertise, and working capital support of around $550 million. Through these partnerships, our role is to act as a facilitator, enabling and accelerating the journey toward achieving at least $1 billion in exports from India — a goal aligned with the vision set out by our Ministry

What sustainable initiatives or innovative environmental solutions is PDS implementing?

PDS approaches sustainability through a structured framework built around four pillars:

• Respect water
• Reduce emissions
• Build community
• Think circular

Illustrating a few examples of our initiatives:

• Progress Apparels (Bangladesh) our manufacturing facility in Bangladesh, has integrated ECOGREEN washing technology to promote sustainable practices and significantly reduce water which is funded by Good Fashion Fund.
• Zamira Denim has adopted eco-efficient machinery that reduces water consumption and minimises chemical discharge in the dyeing process.
• Norlanka our factory in Sri Lanka, has implemented rainwater harvesting systems that have made a meaningful contribution to groundwater replenishment.
• Further, Norlanka has installed solar panels to boost renewable energy adoption and support long-term environmental sustainability.

We further engage in meaningful community building. A large number of our factory workers are women, and we provide childcare facilities to support them, as well as fair-price shops where they can buy daily essentials conveniently. These initiatives make workplaces more inclusive and sustainable.

A few months ago, Bangladesh restricted imports via sea. Did this affect your operations?

No, it did not have any material impact. With our network of 600+ partner factories across the globe and a team of 140 compliance professionals, we uphold strong governance standards across factories, worker well-being, and timely payment of dues — ensuring continuity and stability in our operations. Compliant factories that ensure worker welfare are least affected by disruptions. Additionally, our banking operations are run from stable hubs like Hong Kong and Dubai, which minimises exposure to local disruptions – such as those seen during Sri Lanka’s recent economic crisis as well.

How is PDS integrating circular economy principles, and what challenges have you faced?

At PDS, our approach to circularity is grounded in responsible business practices and long-term value creation. We have embedded circular economy principles across design, sourcing, materials, and manufacturing by working closely with our partner ecosystem — over 600 factories, with less than 10 per cent of our production done in-house, and 90 per cent is through partner factories.

Answering the second part of your question – the biggest challenge what is seen within industry, however, is mindset. Traditionally, the industry has focused on maximising profitability. Our belief at PDS is that true profitability is sustainable profitability — achieved when you operate responsibly, prioritise resource efficiency, and create value without compromising the future.

For example, when it comes to managing excess inventory after end-of-season sales, rather than sending leftover garments to landfills, we have the capability to ship them to Eastern Europe and Africa for resale at lower prices, extending their life cycle. We also partnered with Upcycle Labs in Nottingham in UK, that uses a patented process to crush unsold garments and turn them into non-combustible bricks and showroom artifacts — and these refabricated products have even been used by some leading global luxury brands to build their stores. This demonstrates our genuine commitment to circularity.

How do you assess India’s competitiveness in global textile sourcing?

India’s competitiveness is a mixed bag at the moment – on one hand there’s genuine excitement around the initiatives taken by the Government of India—textile parks, PLI schemes, robust capital markets, and new FTAs which are encouraging entrepreneurship. On the other hand, labour management poses a challenge – for example, the absenteeism rate at a factory in Bangladesh we work with is around 3 per cent, whereas the same rate at a factory in India may go up to 20 per cent.  Infrastructure delays also exist — transporting goods from factory to port takes 10–11 days in India, compared to 3–4 days in neighbouring economies. This however doesn’t erase the excitement for the industry’s future. On the fiscal front, domestic consumption for apparel is rising rapidly, crossing the $100 billion mark in India and projected to grow upto 12 per cent annually. Combined with FTA advantages and capital market support, India’s apparel and textile sector is clearly moving in the right direction. These issues notwithstanding, I feel we will eventually but surely overcome them, and that belief is why we acquired Knit Gallery – we are confident that we can facilitate $1 billion+ in exports from India, similar to our success in Bangladesh.

How does PDS engage with MSMEs to promote regional craftsmanship and sustainable growth?

We have a limited role here. We operate in the value segment — our largest customers include Primark, Walmart, and Sainsbury’s. While apparel is our core, we are expanding into home textiles. We work with small enterprises across various regions of India, connecting them directly with global customers. We benefit from $550 million of working capital lines, helping them manage cash flow when serving large retailers, who will usually expect manufacturers to provide 60 to 90 days of credit.

How is the global home textile sector performing, and what role is India playing?

Keeping tariffs aside, the home textile business is in good shape. Major Indian players are expanding to home textiles; and we at PDS recently secured a $400 million contract with a UK retailer and are finalising a $200 million US contract, both anchored around sourcing from India.

This is in part due to Indian products being well-accepted globally. The challenge lies in scalability — the sector is fragmented. PDS helps bridge that gap by bringing structure, working capital, and global standards to smaller producers.

What factors have contributed to PDS’s growth, and what are its future priorities?

Challenging times are exciting times for PDS. With global tariff fluctuations, our wide factory network gives us flexibility to serve customers from alternate locations. We anticipated diversification early — we’ve already built partnerships in Egypt, Africa, and Latin America which we saw as key upcoming regions for nearshoring to ensure resilience. We have strong optimism given our business model, and the UK FTA presents us with the opportunity to showcase our strengths as a business and grow our operations from India.

The two key growth drivers ahead for us are:

• Geographical flexibility through our plug-and-play model.
• India expansion via our Knit Gallery acquisition and the UK–India FTA, leveraging our strong UK customer base (50 per cent of our sales).

These make us confident about our future growth.